I Knew It!

Hey, did anyone see the story on the news the other day about Face Blindness? I've been joking for years that my inability to recognize people out of context was really a neurological problem. Turns out I was right!

There's an actual medical condition called prosopagnosia, in which people are literally unable to recognize others' faces. People who have the most severe form don't even recognize their loved ones. They rely on voices, hair color, mannerisms... but shown the faces of their own children, they won't know who those kids are!

The condition can be caused by brain injury, or a person can be born with it. It also tends to run in families, although not everyone will be affected equally.

Want to know more? Here's a link to the Prosopagnosia Research Centers, based at Harvard and at University College London. The "Research" page has links to TV news stories and newspaper articles about Face Blindness.

p.s. Here's a cool self-test for recognition memory, including facial recognition. I scored above average on verbal and object recognition, but slightly below average on faces (although nowhere near prosopagnosia level). See? I knew there was something medical going on!

Times Flies

....and, it's July.

Last time I checked in was, what, March?! Road to you-know-where and good intentions...

So tonight, I thought we could talk about time. What I'm about to tell you is still very much in the research stages, so don't go getting ideas that it's definitely true. I just thought it was kind of cool, and a neat jumping-off point for a science fiction tale...

This comes from Virendra Desai, an undergrad at UPenn. She studied the effect of aging and of brain damage on people's perception of time. I'd once heard that as we age, time seems to "speed up" due to changes in the nervous system--a nice excuse for my having been incommunicado for FOUR MONTHS when I promised monthly blog updates. Unfortunately for me, Desai's older subjects perceived time just the same as her younger ones, so there goes my excuse.

What Desai did find out is that damage to the parietal lobe of the brain can mess with time. When an image appears on a computer screen for five seconds, normal people can guess pretty accurately that it was five seconds. The brain-damaged person thinks it was ten. Fifteen seconds seems like thirty, and so on. Basically, something in the damaged brain tissue causes the person's internal clock to speed up.

Pretty cool, huh? Would someone with this condition get impatient more easily than a normal person? Would they be able to get their work done twice as fast?